Jacobus Vaet - Music and Influence

Music and Influence

Vaet's influences included Nicolas Gombert, whose style of unbroken, smooth polyphony can be seen in most of Vaet's music; his friend Clemens non Papa; and Lassus, whose style he often imitated. Vaet used cross-relations to a degree rare at the time (though they are also significant in the music of Gombert), and they pungently spice contrapuntal passages; sometimes they are even simultaneous, resulting in dissonant clashes: no one would mistake his music for that of Palestrina, for this reason alone. Vaet also sometimes ended compositions on minor triads (for example the motet Postquam consummati essent — ending on a minor chord was a relative rarity before the late 16th century). Another peculiarity of his style was a liking for progressions based on the circle of fifths, as well as dominant-tonic cadences, both features which foreshadow the changes in music which were to come at the end of the century. His use of circle-of-fifths progressions may be an influence from Lassus; it is also a feature of Spanish polyphony of the period, and as a member of the chapel of Charles V, and later Maximilian II, he may have been familiar with the music of Spaniards such as Guerrero, who wrote in a similar idiom and also worked for Maximilian.

Even more unusual than his pungent cross-relations was his liking for quotation and parody. He was the first to write a Missa quodlibetica, a five-voice mass which was a series of quodlibets—simultaneous presentations of several familiar tunes, from both sacred and secular sources. In other compositions he also borrowed sections of pieces by his associates and predecessors, including Josquin, Jean Mouton, Jacquet of Mantua, Clemens non Papa and Cipriano de Rore.

Vaet wrote nine complete masses which have survived, including a setting of the Requiem, one of relatively few from before the mid-16th century. His many surviving motets are both sacred and secular, and also wrote eight settings each of the Magnificat and the Marian antiphon Salve Regina; the antiphons were all late works, published in the 1560s. Vaet also wrote a handful of chansons in French, and one setting in German of Vater unser im Himmelreich.